"I held the colony for you," said Leah.
She said it quietly, without accusation, in the round black room under the ant forest. Ainz stood before the great wall of glass with his hands behind his back, in the plain dark armor of Momon, and did not turn around. On the nearest pane, a long tunnel ran away into blue shadow. It was empty. The ants were gone from it.
"For how long?" he said.
"Forty minutes. From the time you came through the gate until you sat down." Leah poured tea into three cups. "I always do that for guests. I clear the tunnels, I park the colony in the side chambers, and nobody has to squeeze past an ant with a hat. It's polite."
"It is very polite."
"It's also a gap in the cycle."
"Ah."
"Yeah."
Narberal, standing by the door in her robe, looked from one of them to the other and said nothing. She had been told to say nothing. She was extremely good at it.
"Sugaru," said Leah.
"Yes, Leah-sama."
"How long was the gap?"
"Forty-one minutes," said Sugaru, from her place by the table. She had folded her hands in her lap and arranged her face into an expression of calm regret, which on her was very nearly the same as her usual expression. "Thirty of them were my doing. The colony does not move without me. I would have preferred a smoother arrangement."
"It's not your fault."
"It is the fault of the arrangement, which is mine."
"We can fight about it later," said Leah. "Look."
She waved a hand.
The central pane of black glass flickered, and resolved into a torchlit cavern. A column of ten figures in matching gear was moving through it, with a scout out front and two rear guards watching the dark. At the center of the column, a small woman in a plain grey coat held a silver stopwatch in her palm.
"Grimward," said Ainz.
"They came back for the afternoon run."
"They are very punctual."
"They're very punctual," Leah agreed, in a hollow voice. "Watch."
***
The column reached the first junction, and stopped.
The scout, a lean young man with a short bow, crouched at the mouth of the tunnel and put one hand to the stone. He stayed that way for a long moment. Then he looked back over his shoulder, and shook his head.
"Nothing," he said. "No heartbeat. Nothing at all."
"Nothing?" said the man beside Tally. He was broad-shouldered and grave, with a plain steel helm tucked under his arm, and Ainz understood from the way the others stood that he was the leader.
"The junction should be full. We're on the cycle." The scout looked at the empty tunnel. "They should be right here."
"Tally?"
"Hold," said Tally.
She did not look up. She was looking at her palm. Her thumb was moving on the stopwatch, very lightly, and her lips were moving too, in the small, silent way of a person doing sums.
"Eleven point four," she said. "That's the cycle. We hit the first ant at the third minute, the second at the fourth, the wall at the sixth. We should have been in the thick of it by now."
"So the ants are late."
"The ants are not late." She closed her hand around the watch. "The ants have not *started.*"
The column was quiet.
On the glass, Tally lifted her head, and looked down the empty tunnel for a very long time.
"It's like the whole colony took a break," she said, slowly.
"Does that happen?"
"Never. Not once in four hundred runs." She put the watch in her belt. "It's like somebody told them to wait."
In the black room, Ainz felt the cold, faraway thing in his chest turn over.
"She said it," he murmured.
"She did."
"Somebody told them to wait."
"I know, I know." Leah had put down her cup. "She's not wrong, is the thing. That's why she's good."
"Is it possible she attributes it to the right cause?"
"She doesn't know what the cause is. She just knows the shape of what's missing." Leah rubbed her eyes. "Tally's the worst. She's not clever like a trap is clever. She's clever like a surveyor is clever."
"She measures what exists."
"And what doesn't."
On the glass, the column had begun to move again, slowly, with the cautious, uneasy tread of people who have walked into a room that is too quiet. They went down the tunnel. They cleared an empty chamber. They came, in the end, to the third chamber, and the low dais, and the woman in the neat grey coat who sat there with her hands in her lap.
The dais was not empty. Sugaru had left a handmaid in her place, a smaller ant-woman in the same neat grey coat, who rose and bowed as the column came in.
"I do hope," said the handmaid, "that you are enjoying your visit."
The scout flinched. The leader lifted his shield. Tally did not move at all.
In the control room, Sugaru made a small, pained sound.
"I taught her that line," she murmured. "I did not teach her to say it on a day like this."
"It's fine."
"It sounded false."
"It sounded like you."
"That," said Sugaru, "is the problem."
***
They watched the rest of the run in silence.
Grimward cleared the dungeon. It was not a hard run, because the ants were late, and when they finally appeared they came in a ragged, bunched-up wave, with no cycle in it and no order. The guild killed them tidily. It took Tally a very long time to write anything down. When she finally did, she wrote only a single line, and then looked at it, and then crossed it out, and wrote something else.
"What did she write?" said Ainz.
"I can't read it," said Leah. "She crossed it out."
"What did she write the second time?"
"I'll show you." Leah lifted the small tray of glass she used for the forum. She tapped it, and the screen filled with white text on grey. "She posted it five minutes ago."
Ainz leaned in.
LAIR TIMING: ANT FOREST RESPAWN GAP (DISCUSSION)
Posted by Tally (Grimward)
Short post. No conclusions.
We ran the east lair at 14:10 this afternoon. First-contact junction was empty. Not low, EMPTY. No ants for forty-one minutes, then a bunched wave with no cycle. In 400+ logged runs this has not happened once.
I also logged a smaller anomaly three days ago, a twenty-minute delay on the evening run. I did not post it because I assumed it was lag.
I'm posting both now because the same thing happened twice and it shouldn't have happened at all.
I have no explanation. Does anyone else have timing data from the Lieb dungeon for those two windows?
Below it, the thread had already begun.
forty-one minutes is wild. the cycle's tight to the second maybe a server hiccup?
hiccups don't line up with a dungeon's internal timer maybe it's an event no event, i checked what if the Harbinger was busy?
doing what?
hosting lol i'm serious. what if somebody visited?
visited who? it's a boss tally. you saw the clip, right what clip kestrel's. the dark warrior. he was walking through eastern lieb this morning so?
so it's the same day. and what's the other anomaly date three days ago check the kestrel timestamp on the first sighting of the death knights. i think there's one three days ago too
Ainz went absolutely still.
"They are right," he said, in a flat voice.
"Which part?"
"About the first gap." He turned his head. "It was the day Albedo and I came."
"Yes," said Leah.
"We were not seen."
"No. But the colony was held. And the second gap is today. And somebody in the thread is looking at the clip."
"And finding a match."
"And finding a match."
On the glass below them, the thread was growing. New replies arrived every few seconds, in long, rolling bursts. Somebody posted a screenshot. Somebody posted a map. Someone, with great enthusiasm, posted a timeline.
Ainz read it, and read it again, and felt his mind begin, slowly, to do something he had not asked it to do.
It began to recognize.
***
He had seen this before.
He had seen it a dozen times in a dozen forums, in the long years when he had been something else, a man named Suzuki Satoru, who had read the patch notes at lunch and the boss guides on the train. There had always been a first post, quiet and careful and slightly embarrassed, that said: *this might be nothing.* And then a second, which said: *wait, I have something that matches.* And then a third.
It was never the genius who broke a secret. It was the pile.
A thousand people, each with a single small piece, none of them especially clever. One had a timestamp. One had a screenshot. One had a half-remembered line of dialogue from a clip. Each of them, alone, could prove nothing. But they were not alone, and the pieces slid together under their own weight, quietly, until one morning somebody laid them on the table and said: *this is a person.*
*They are not hunting us,* he thought. *That is the worst of it. They are not trying to find us. They are only curious.*
It was the exact thing he had never learned to defend against. A hunter could be killed. A spy could be silenced. But how did one deal with a crowd that only wished to know?
"Ainz," said Leah.
She had said it softly. She had dropped the formal address. He realized, a little late, that his hand had closed into a fist.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I know what this looks like."
"It is not your fault."
"I held the colony. I should have thought."
"You did what any host would do. A guest should not have to fight his way past your soldiers."
"I could have staggered it. Paused half the tunnels, not all. Made it look like a lag instead of a vacuum." She grimaced. "I've been doing this for years and I forgot that gaps are data."
"Then we have both been careless."
"That's sort of comforting."
"It is not meant to be."
She laughed, a small, tired laugh. "Okay. What do we do?"
"I do not know," said Ainz.
He had not meant to say it. It simply came out. It sat in the dim, glowing room like a stone dropped into a pond, and he saw the ripples move across Leah's face.
"I have been in this position before," he said, more carefully. "In a different life. We called it a leak. A thing that could not be unlearned. The method was always the same. Control the story. Give them something better to look at."
"A distraction."
"A larger explanation."
"Like a script," said Leah, thoughtfully.
"Like a script."
"They already think the Harbinger's scripted."
"But they will not think so long," said Ainz. "Not once the thread is finished."
Leah looked at the glass. The thread had grown by another page. It was beginning to fork into side arguments: one on appraisal, one on the Honor Guard, one on the possibility that the Dark Warrior was a hidden developer account.
"I can slow it," she said. "I can leak a couple of timing quirks, make it look like noise. I can have Sugaru stagger a few runs."
"That will buy a week."
"I know."
"And they will notice the difference."
"I know that too."
"Then we are in the same position," said Ainz, "as before. Only with more attention."
"That," said Leah, "is a very Ainz way to put it."
He did not know whether it was a compliment.
***
"There's one more thing," said Sugaru.
It was the first time she had spoken in some minutes. She was looking at the small pane of glass in Leah's hands. Her antennae, which were usually still, had begun to curl.
"What?" said Leah.
"A reply. Near the bottom."
Leah scrolled.
It was a short one, from an account named Harrow. The avatar beside it was a small, severe icon of a black wolf's head.
harrow: forty-one minutes is enough for a raid.
harrow: if the ants really do go quiet when this dark warrior is around, then he's either in on it or he's a key to it.
harrow: either way, somebody ought to test him.
There was a pause. Then another line appeared underneath.
harrow: with a few friends.
"Who is that?" said Ainz.
"I don't know." Leah frowned. "Harrow. Not a canon ranker, not a name I know. Probably a hunter. They go after monster players. Mostly goblins."
"I am not a goblin."
"You're a question mark with a trading company," said Leah. "To them, that's the same thing, only better."
On the glass, the line had already begun to collect replies.
yeah? count me in i'll bring the fire mages he's got death knights though so? we bring more is it a PK or a quest why not both
Ainz looked at it for a long moment.
Behind him, Narberal drew a very small, very careful breath. He did not turn. He could feel, across the room, the stillness of someone who was extremely politely waiting to be told she could stop being nice.
"Not yet," he said.
"Yes, my lord."
"They have only said they will test him. They have not said when."
"They will say when," said Narberal.
"Yes," said Ainz, quietly. "I expect they will."
He folded his hands behind him, and looked up at the high black wall of glass where, a thousand times over, in a thousand little windows, a thousand small and curious people were writing down what they had seen. And at the bottom of the central pane, in a single dark corner, a woman in a grey coat sat alone on a rock at the edge of a quiet cavern, her silver stopwatch ticking in one hand, her pen scratching steadily across a small white card.
She was not hurrying.
She had all the time in the world.